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RISC-V is great for platforms where low cost, simple design, existing toolchain is important. In these areas it probably is the future. If your goal is maximum
by quelsolaar 6y ago
RISC-V is great for platforms where low cost, simple design, existing toolchain is important. In these areas it probably is the future.
If your goal is maximum performance, and general purpose platforms, then it's not very interesting at all. You dont want RISC-V in your PC, but you do want it in your toaster.
RISC-V deserves hype, but that hype should be confined to what RISC-V is good at, not convince you that RISC-V will kill every other ISA.
- jayp1418 6y agoRisc-V + NetBSD + toaster :D
- beaner 6y ago> You dont want RISC-V in your PC Why not? Isn't the Apple M1 showing exactly the opposite?
- mromanuk 6y agoApple M1 is not RISC V, it’s Arm and it’s heavily tweaked
- bem94 6y agoThe point is that RISC-V allows people to build their own tweaked / extended processors without having to pay an ARM and a leg for it.
- MangoCoffee 6y ago>without having to pay an ARM and a leg for it. why Apple M1 and AWS Graviton is based on ARM? if ARM license cost is a concern. even smaller players use ARM as well...
- mlyle 6y agoBecause RISC-V wasn't ready yet, and still isn't ready. Ecosystems matter. But the ecosystem sure seems primed for massive growth, and there's no architectural reason why RISC-V can't perform as high as ARM and beyond.
- wmf 6y agoWhat's the cost of ARM licensing relative to designing a processor? 1%? 10%? 100%?
- beaner 6y agoI guess I interpreted the original comment as RISC vs CISC and an M1 is RISC, though not RISC-V.
- brucehoult 6y agoARM64 and RISCV64 are so similar ISAs that whatever implementation you can do with one you can do with the other, given the same level of engineering skill and effort. Apple probably spent billions to make M1. If someone made the same investment with RISC-V they could get the same results -- the main company currently pushing higher performance RISC-V (SiFive) has total funding of under $200m so they clearly don't have billions to spend. They've got an announced CPU (tested in FPGA) with ARM A72 level performance. That's only about five years of very incremental performance improvements behind (non-Apple) ARM.
- quelsolaar 6y agoOnly sort of. If you care about power consumption (like a thin and light laptop, a tablet or a phone) then the M1 looks pretty good. But if you want optimal performance, for gaming, engineering, ML, and other workstation tasks, then you want a design that is only optimized for performance, and can make use of a much larger power envelope.
- syntaxing 6y agoPardon my ignorance on this subject, but is there something inherently better in RISC-V than traditional PICs or other uCs? I have a RISC-V Pinecil and I haven't really figured out what to do with it yet besides the cool factor.
- cat199 6y ago> haven't really figured out what to do with it pretty much the same thing one does with any other exotic hardware- install a niche unix variant, then proceed to stare at 'top' and 'show registers' output in the debugger while fantasizing about how cool it is and fixing programs that don't build on it yet :)
- Gibbon1 6y agoI haven't closely followed RISC-V but I think the deal is it's scalable. You can build low end and high end processor cores with it. A PIC or ARV etc can really never be a high end machine. And something like a modern 0x86 would really never be low end either. A small aside legacy processor cores on modern CMOS can do fast bit twiddling while consuming trivial amounts of power and die area.
- ncmncm 6y agoSolder pins to circuit boards.
- er4hn 6y agoI think this is a great point. Products succeed by doing well in a specific market and branching out from there to cover more use cases. RISC-V is not going to succeed in the Desktop / Laptop / Server CPU markets because the designs are nowhere near as specialized as what AMD/Intel (along with Apple I guess..) are putting out. Where RISC-V can show its value is in the IoT / Embedded markets. There are not high requirements for speed or efficiency, cheapness and ease of integration is going to win out there. If RISC-V can win in those markets the designs made using it can improve over time to take on markets with higher requirements.
- oblio 6y agoWell, disruption often starts at the low end. That's what ARM has been doing. If RISC-V can out-ARM ARM, it will probably have a similar long term trajectory.